Late shift leads to vows for ER worker, police officer

Feb. 9, 2013

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Pete and Dana Wislocki on Jan. 29 in Lafayette. The couple met in the Home Hospital ER in 1982. This July they will celebrate being married for 30 years. / John Terhune/Journal & Courier

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Among police officers and emergency room workers, it’s a time-honored rule that rookies work the graveyard shift.

The experience can be grueling — but eye-opening and highly educational, too, former rookies say.

And for some, such as Pete and Dana Wislocki, who will be married 30 years in July, it’s when they fell in love.

In the wee hours of a February night in 1982, rookie Lafayette Police Officer Pete Wislocki walked into the Home Hospital emergency room to introduce himself. He knew that at some point he’d be working with the staff there.

That’s when he met Dana Hogle, then an EMT studying to be a paramedic. Although he says he fell in love at that first meeting, it was months before they went out together.

Not that she was opposed to dating. A friend and co-worker, Joy O’Brien, encouraged her, saying, “You can go out with him. You don’t have to marry him.”

They started dating that June. Wislocki came from a family of six kids. He could cook. They talked for hours.

The two became a couple, and on a late summer afternoon before starting their shifts, they strolled downtown. They walked into a jewelry store, and Wislocki started looking at rings.

“He showed me one and said, ‘Do you like this one?’ ” she said. After she said yes, he turned to the jeweler and said, “We’ll take it.”

Back at Home Hospital and at the police department, they told their co-workers of their plans. O’Brien said to the soon-to-be Dana Wislocki: “I told you, you didn’t have to marry him.”

She was teasing, of course.

“We were all so close,” Dana Wislocki said. “It would be like telling our big brother or sister.”

Most of those working the late shift were in their early 20s. Through good times and bad they stuck together, she said.

“A lot of people have bad memories of the hospital, but we have a lot of good ones,” she said. “Our oldest was christened in the chapel there. I met my husband there.